Robert Plant and Jack White?

Robert Plant wants to make a single with Jack White. The former Led Zeppelin singer has proposed recording a 56-year-old rock song with Third Man boss, even specifying the place and date. There’s only one problem: White will be on tour. “I love Jack White’s buccaneer spirit, and the way he dodges through the musical horizons,” Plant wrote as part of a Facebook chat on Tuesday. He said he would be “happy” to record a song with the former White Stripe, suggesting that they do it at Third Man Records headquarters this weekend. “I’m going to Nashville on Sunday and can do it on Monday morning! I’ve got lunch with Alison Krauss at 2pm and cocktails with Patty Griffin at 8pm.”
Plant seemed to have already given the choice of material a lot of thought. “I’d like to do a track called Love Me, which was originally recorded by The Phantom,” he wrote. It’s an apt selection: recorded in 1958, two years after Elvis Presley’s Hound Dog, it has become one of the rockabilly’s underground classics.

Love Me has long been one of Plant’s favourites, and he considered releasing a cover version on his 1988 solo album Now and Zen. “What I liked about [Love Me] was that it was so ramshackle and everything was so over-affected that you had to search to find out what the fuck was going on inside the song,” he told Goldmine in 1993. “In the middle of it all there’s a radical singer huffing and puffing and swaggering and swirling and twirling his hips and grinding himself into infinity, who now drives a truck somewhere in Illinois, probably.” In fact, the Phantom was musician Jerry Lott, who died in 1983.)

Unfortunately, Plant and White will not be able to meet in a Nashville studio next week: White is due to be playing across the country on 15 and 16 September, first in Columbia, Maryland and then in Cleveland, Ohio. Still, Consequence of Sound has observed that both rockers will be in Leeds for gigs on 17 November. Could the Phantom come to Yorkshire?

Source: The Guardian